Here Is a Thing That Really Pissed Me Off About BuzzFeed Today (And, Yes, It Involved GIFs)

Hmm, so maybe I’m ultra-sensitive to this because earlier today I wrote about how important I think it is to use appropriate imagery when reporting on important news stories, i.e. the Westgate terrorist attack in Nairobi, or the shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C. But so, whatever. I’m ultra-sensitive. Fine. That still doesn’t mean these lists aren’t terrible. Obviously they’re reductive and simplistic and obviously anyone with a healthy sense of cynicism (and that’s me, I swear, that’s me) should be able to just look at these lists and smirk and move on, but you know what? Sometimes it’s really fucking hard to do that, because cynical as I am (and really, that’s pretty goddamned cynical) it’s sort of horrifying that anyone thinks it’s a good idea to take important news stories (some of them involving the deaths of thousands of people) and reduce them to GIFs. So, in honor of my annoyance with Buzzfeed and GIFs and, I guess, the world, here’s a bunch of Buzzfeed’s most inappropriate uses of GIFs to explain the news.